In Memoriam – Professor Robert Owen

Professor Robert Owen OBE died on 7 March 2018 at the age of 96. Tributes have been paid to Prof Owen, a ‘leading orthopaedic surgeon whose many achievements included treating children with scoliosis all over the world’.

Robert Owen was born in Chwilog near Pwllheli and grew up on the family farm. He was head boy at Pwllheli Grammar School and had aspirations to be a vet until his younger brother William fell off a bike. Robert, then a teenager, took him to see a doctor. Prof Owen’s daughter Gilly explained that Robert ‘actually passed out during the operation, but the doctor told him he wasn’t going to be a vet, he was going to go into medicine, and said that he knew the Dean at Guy’s Hospital in London – and that was that’.

After qualifying at Guy’s and serving for three years in the RAF, Prof Owen decided on a career in orthopaedics. He had a special interest in disabilities in children, and this interest led him to set up the Clwyd Special Riding Centre. He was especially interested in scoliosis and held clinics in places as diverse as Brazil, Africa, Nepal and Norway.

Prof Owen’s daughter Gilly told the ‘Daily Post’ that one of his students, who is now in his 80s, is coming from Brazil to attend his funeral. Prof Owen met his wife Meg in West Kirby – they had two children, Gilly and David.

Robert Owen was awarded an OBE for services to medicine in 1990 – his achievements included co-founding the Ronald McDonald House at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital and helping establish Robert Owen House at Broadgreen Hospital in Liverpool to accommodate the relatives of patients. He saw the need for such a place after having major heart surgery at Broadgreen.

Robert Owen was the Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at Liverpool University and had been a consultant and Professor at Royal Liverpool University Hospital and Alder Hey.

Gilly commented that her dad ‘was also a very charismatic presence who would cajole people to do things before they even realised. He was so proud to be Welsh. It meant everything to him and he was a member of the Gorsedd of Bards. He was a modest man and a hard act to follow’.

Professor Owen’s funeral is taking place at Rhos-on-Sea Methodist Church on March 23.

Gilly told the ‘Daily Post’ that her dad ‘had more energy than anyone I’ve ever met, even during these last few months’.

That’s true – on each occasion that I met Prof Owen he was full of beans and utterly charming. However I too have a lot of energy – probably as much as Prof Owen – which has enabled me to work long hours writing this blog exposing Robert Owen’s friends and colleagues who facilitated a sex trafficking ring in north Wales. For the man who has just turned his toes up is THE Robert Owen who co-ordinated the cover-up of the serious criminality of Dr Dafydd Alun Jones, Dr Tony Francis (Dr X), Gwynedd Social Services and Gwynedd and Clwyd Health Authorities in 1988 (see post ‘Enter Professor Robert Bluglass CBE’).

Documents in my possession demonstrate that whilst organising the ‘investigation’ into my complaint in his capacity as the Medical Ombudsman for the Welsh Office, Owen was receiving unofficial mail regarding me – and taking phone calls – at his home in Colwyn Bay and furthermore some of that information was coming from the corrupt GP Dr DGE Wood, who was assisting with running the sex abuse gang yet hadn’t been named in my complaint and was no longer involved in my ‘care’ (see post ‘The Blog Post That Was Hacked Can Now Be Read’). Owen had copies of the documentation which I now have – detailing the criminal activities of Dafydd et al and plans to frame me for serious crimes whilst Andrew Park, the corrupt lawyer employed by the Welsh Office, admitted that I had not committed any such crimes.

Owen knew exactly what that lot were doing and he was their willing accomplice.

I have only recently noticed that some of the dates on the documentation related to Owen’s cover-up are inaccurate – someone either altered those dates after the cover-up or those documents were deliberately marked with inaccurate dates. I am currently trawling through those documents and correlating them with other documentation in order to try and work out exactly what has gone on.

I had always presumed that Owen was a man who represented the worst of the medical establishment and that he concealed the wrongdoing of Dafydd and the paedophile gang because he was the sort of man who just couldn’t bear to see medicine brought into disrepute. I thought for a long time that Owen held a Chair at Cardiff, but when I realised that he had a Chair at Liverpool, I presumed that he had also acted out of loyalty to the old boy’s network at Liverpool University Medical School – Dafydd is a graduate of Liverpool.

However the information that has been made public in these tributes to Robert Owen suggest something so much worse. Owen was most definitely Of The Paedophiles’ Friends. The paedophiles’ friends were using the Gorsedd of the Bards as a networking base and they had a stronghold at Pwhelli. Pwhelli was the base of the dreadful Glanville Owen who was the senior manager responsible for the children’s homes run by Gwynedd Social Services whilst the paedophile gang ran riot in those homes home (see post ‘I Know Nuzzing…’). Pwhelli also housed a number of corrupt police officers, lawyers and magistrates who could be relied upon to bang up victims of the paedophile gang (see post ‘A Bit More About Those Very Muddy Waters’ and ‘These Sharks Are Crap As Well’). The Godfather of Pwhelli High Society is Robyn Lewis, a retired solicitor and former Archdruid of the Gorsedd. Robyn Lewis will have known Robert Owen – they probably went to school with each other. It was Robyn Lewis who inducted the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams into the Gorsedd.

Robert Owen led the charge against Edwina Hart when she tried to prevent the paedophiles’ friends of Liverpool from killing those citizens of north Wales who had spilt the paedophiles’ pints (see post ‘A Vampire At Glyndwr University!’).

I note that Robert Owen was an alumnus of Guy’s. So he will have known of Dafydd’s mate Professor Jim Watson, who worked at the Maudsley with Dafydd, then passed through St George’s Hospital Medical School and then set up a sex therapy clinic at Guy’s and St Thomas’s. In my post ‘Just A Language Divide?’ I speculated whether the Dafydd/Jim Watson network was responsible for the mad and violent Dr Andy Jones gaining a place at Guy’s. Andy had served in the RAF – and told me that Guy’s had been particularly welcoming to him because he had been in the RAF. Just like Robert Owen!

Owen’s own career as a Top Doctor seems to have had the serendipitous beginning that was so common among men of his generation. The swot of Pwhelli Grammar School came to the attention of a local Top Doctor who was mates with Someone Big in England…

For some reason Robert Owen was even more keen to conceal the wrongdoing of Tony Francis and Gwynedd Social Services than he was of Dafydd. Owen had a mountain of documentation that demonstrated that Francis and Lucille Hughes of Gwynedd Social Services were perjuring themselves and encouraging other people to do so in order to secure convictions against me and had illegally imprisoned me. Francis and Gwynedd Social Services were not mentioned in the Report that was written by Bluglass after the ‘investigation’ into my complaint – their criminal activities were simply not mentioned or referred to in any way.

Francis killed himself a few years ago when Operation Pallial re-opened the investigation into the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal and now Robert Owen has bitten the dust, so we cannot ask either of them why Francis and Gwynedd Social Services could break the law and no-one would even mention it.

Bluglass, Dafydd, Lucille and Robyn Lewis – you are still alive and kicking, although for how much longer I do not know. Come out of your caves and enlighten us all. Was Tony Francis abusing those kids himself or was he just a very good friend of those who were?

Regarding Owen’s activities – professional and charitable – at Alder Hey. Alder Hey found itself at the centre of a scandal when it was revealed that between 1988-95, children’s organs had been removed from their bodies without authorisation. Organs were retained in more than 2,000 pots containing body parts from around 850 infants. Alder Hey had also given thymus glands- removed from live children during heart surgery – to a pharmaceutical company for research in return for financial donations. Alder Hey also stored without consent 1,500 fetuses that were miscarried, stillborn or aborted.

In 2001, the Redfern Report revealed that pathologist Professor Dick van Velzen – one of Robert Owen’s colleagues – had systematically ordered the illegal stripping of every organ from every child who had had a postmortem, even for the children of parents who specifically stated that they did not want a full post-mortem. van Velzen also falsified records and post-mortem reports and took records away with him when he left Alder Hey.

Alder Hey and Liverpool University knew there were risks in appointing Professor van Velzen but failed to supervise him. They failed to monitor his work or follow up complaints and missed numerous chances to discipline him.

The general public was scandalised by the conduct of Prof van Velzen. They shouldn’t have been. He was conducting himself in the way that numerous Top Doctors in the UK do, but no-one ever finds out. Much was made of the fact that van Velzen was Dutch. In my experience, nationality doesn’t play a major role in terms of the unscrupulousness of Top Doctors. van Velzen was appointed to Alder Hey in 1988 – the year in which Robert Owen concealed a paedophile gang led by Top Doctors in north Wales.

I am left wondering why Robert Owen only bagged an OBE for his valiant effort in concealing the paedophile gang that included Sir Peter Morrison, Thatcher’s friend and the Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party. I suspect that it was another example of the entrenched anti-Welsh feeling among the higher echelons of British society. The paedophiles’ friends of Wales rarely end up with anything more than an OBE or MBE – Peter Higson, David Prichard, Elfed Roberts, Keith Thomson, D.G.E. Wood, none of them hit the criteria for a CBE. Robert Bluglass, Tom Burns et al received CBEs – and the biggest crooks of the lot are sitting in the Lords…

How are you this morning Lords Kinnock/Wigley/Roger Roberts?

As for those of you to whom Lilibet would only give an OBE – what a bunch of sad, crawling, pathetic bastards you are. One presumes that you subscribe to the notion that gongs really mean something because you all appeared grinning in the local media when you were honoured. Didn’t you notice that none of you won the big prizes?

So who’s going to bite the dust next then? I’ll get a crate of champagne in because with any luck there’ll be a few more paedophiles’ friends pegging out over the next year, a lot of them are now in their 80s.

Author: Sally Baker

I am a writer and a sociologist, originally from Somerset, but I’ve been based in Wales for most of my life. I had my first encounter with a mental health professional in 1984 at the age of 21. My GP described this man to my then partner – who also became a sociologist – as someone who had experienced ‘considerable success’. My meeting with this psychiatrist was a disaster and we attempted to complain about his insensitivity and highly inappropriate behaviour. That was the first time we were threatened and pressurised to withdraw a complaint against a mental health professional. This man is long dead – he was a retired psychiatrist from the North Wales Hospital Denbigh, T. Gwynne Williams, who was working shifts in the student health centre at University College of North Wales (now Bangor University). We discovered years later that this ‘successful man’ was notorious – he had been an enthusiastic lobotomist…